Building supermicelles from simple polymers

摘要

Toy blocks such as Lego allow complex structures to be built from the simple blocks. Similarly, synthetic chemists are attempting to make large and complex molecules from simple reagents (1). On page 1329 of this issue, Qiu et al. (2) report an elegant strategy for making well-defined micrometer-scale superstructures by using a series of polymerization techniques and selective self-assembly processes. A classic strategy for making large molecules is polymerization, which yields mac-romolecules as large as 10 nm. However, as the sizes increase, it becomes much harder to control their shapes and molecular weights. Also, conventional polymerizations produce macromolecules with a range of molecular weights. Living polymerization overcomes some of these problems, producing macro-molecules with controlled molecular weight and narrow dispersity (3). This approach has allowed the synthesis of block copolymers that consist of at least two distinct polymer segments connected together.